Tech, sports and TV giants take the stage for day 2 of Web Summit

Europe’s largest tech conference is a smorgasbord for the tech world this week.

Daytwo of the Web Summit 2014, in Dublin, was another raging success with big names from the not only the tech and investor sphere but also sporting, TV and entertainment giants.

There is so much going on at the Web Summit this week that it feels it could be spread over two weeks rather than three days. With over 500 talks, 1,000 start ups and companies represented and the 22,000 attendees the RDS is literally a smorgasbord for the tech world this week.

Professional skateboarder Tony Hawk was on site to speak about the Hawk Foundation which aims at empowering youth and making the world a better place through skating.

He talked about how his philanthropic work is helping children from low income areas in the US, and deprived areas internationally, and how he never imagined skateboarding would allow him to make a positive contribution.

Also Rio Ferdinand, Premier League footballer and entrepreneur, described how Twitter “was his weapon” to show people who he really is. He revealed his managerial ambitions, hoping to take the reins of a team in the future.

On the Centre Stage Dana Brunetti, Producer of “House of Cards” and movies such as the “Social Network”, spoke about how the award-winning Netflix produced drama, “House of Cards”, truly disrupted the traditional television space.

Brunetti said "Netflix said they wanted to release all the episodes at once and there was speculation that you'd lose the watercooler talk week to week but people are more sophisticated. Binge viewing has been around since dvd box-sets. Appointment viewing is dead and the same thing is going to happen to movies."

The CEO of Getty Images, Jonathan Klein, spoke about the fact that he can never see a world where intellectual property is free. Getty has a library of over 160,000,000 images and Klein says that no matter what photographers from Ohio to Dublin need to be paid for their content.

At the Food Summit Alan Richman, of “Man vs. Food” fame, sampled the culinary delights on offer from the 400 producers before giving a press conference in Simmonscourt. He passed on the advice from his father that sparked his love of all things culinary: “you don’t have to finish it, but try it”.

At the Machine Stage, Danae Ringelmann from Indiegogo spoke about how crowdfunding has enabled millions of independent creators and makers to reach markets that were once unimaginable She shared the secrets of this revolutionary finance model and how entrepreneurs can use it to their advantage. Just one day left and already it has been announced that tickets for Web Summit 2015 will go on sale soon. It seems this conference, now the largest of its kind in Europe, which has sprouted up over five years, is only going to get bigger and bigger.